A Loop

I thought I had a handle on the timing and nature of chemotherapy side effects, and clearly I was deluded. I've come to expect the worst in the four days immediately after chemo, but all of a sudden I'm having the worst four days BEFORE chemo. That's an odd thing and it throws me for a bit of a loop. Mind you, these effects aren't that bad, but I confess, I'm growing just a tad weary of and depressed by all this illness. Yeah, yeah, it beats dying of cancer and all, but you try yorking into a trash can at work for five minutes straight and pretend that it's all good.

On a lighter note, I suddenly became interested in the so-called Winter War, when the Soviet Union invaded Finland in November 1939. The Finns put up a hugely spirited defense and inflicted horrendous casualties on the Soviet Army, whose mismanagement might have been called comical if it didn't involve so many useless deaths. The Finns were eventually exhausted by superior Russian numbers and, ammunition expended, were forced to accept a Russian diktat at what amounts to bayonet point, but to the end the Finns were never really beaten.

I don't know how my sudden interest in Finnish history came about, but it did. And I suddenly recalled that I had a model of an early Bristol Blenheim light bomber in my collection, the rivet-heavy Airfix one, and my memory was that it had Finnish and British markings. So I started the search for the Blenheim, looking high and low and sorting through heaps of dusty model boxes in the garage, getting ever filthier and almost convincing myself that if I was going to traipse around in such a favorable environment for Black Widow spiders I should at least wear shoes. But eventually I found the kit and - alas! Free French markings, not Finnish. Nothing against the Free French, mind you, but I was really looking forward to Finnish markings.

Not that it matters. Tonight I have to go to my mom's house so I won't be working on models anyway. It's a regular extended-family get-together at mom's. I'm not sure how many people will be involved - judging from the noise level, it could easily be three or four hundred people, but I doubt it's actually more than twenty. So even if I had a Finnish Blenheim, would it do me any good?

Nope. I'd probably just throw up on it anyway.